About Waveward
Waveward opens Audacity project files — .aup4 from Audacity 4 and .aup3 from Audacity 3 — directly in the browser. You can see the tracks, play the mix, export WAV or MP3, check a damaged project and recover what survived, and rewrite an Audacity 4 project so Audacity 3.7 opens it again. It runs on any machine, including one that has never had Audacity installed.
Why it exists
An Audacity project is a database, not an audio file. That is invisible until the moment it matters: someone emails you an .aup3 and you cannot play it, a recording turns up on an old drive years after the app is gone, or Audacity refuses to open the session you were editing an hour ago. Audacity 4.0 added a third case in September 2026 — it converts old projects to the new .aup4 format as it opens them, one way, and Audacity 3.7 will not touch the result.
The existing answers were all "install Audacity and export it", which is no answer on a Chromebook, a phone, a locked-down work laptop, or a machine still on Audacity 3. For a corrupted project the official fix is a command-line utility that shipped only for 64-bit Windows and Linux until January 2026, and still has to be run from a terminal.
How it works
The project file is read with the browser's File API and parsed in a Web Worker, using SQLite compiled to WebAssembly. The engine decodes Audacity's binary project document, walks each clip to the audio blocks it is built from, applies offsets, trims and amplitude envelopes, and mixes the tracks — the same reconstruction Audacity performs to draw its timeline. Encoding to WAV or MP3 happens in the same worker.
Nothing is uploaded. Only a license key ever touches the network, and only when you paste one in. You can disconnect from the network after the page loads and everything still works.
What it does not do
- Realtime and master-track effects are not rendered. Exports are a dry mix with clip gain and envelopes applied, and the page tells you how many effects a project has as soon as it opens.
- Per-clip time stretching is approximated rather than resampled, and reported after each mix.
- Audio in blocks that were never written to disk cannot be recovered. Those gaps become silence, and the report says exactly where.
- Old .aup files from Audacity 1 and 2 keep their audio in a separate folder, so the file alone holds nothing to recover.
Pricing
Opening a project, reading its structure, playing it and running the full recovery report are free at any size the browser can hold; exporting the stereo mix is free for projects up to 256 MB. Rebuilding a damaged project, rolling back to an earlier save, downgrading to .aup3, exporting per-track stems and exporting larger projects are a one-time license with no subscription. There is no streaming reader: the whole project is held in the tab's memory, about twice the file size.
Who builds it
An independent developer. Bug reports, format edge cases and projects that refuse to open are genuinely welcome at vertrigr@gmail.com — a project that fails to open is the most useful thing you can send, though please describe it rather than attaching a recording you would not want to share.
Trademark
Audacity is a registered trademark of Muse Group. Waveward is an independent tool that reads the project format; it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Muse Group or the Audacity project.